With more than 7 lakh people across the globe infected and nearly 38,000 people killed due to the highly infectious and deadly coronavirus, the Hyderabad-based researchers from University of Hyderabad (UoH) have come out with a potential solution that could lead to the development of a vaccine at a faster pace than anticipated by the scientists across the globe.

According to Dr. Seema Mishra, who is working as a faculty in the department of biochemistry at the School of Life Sciences at UoH, they have designed potential vaccine candidates called T cell epitopes, which can act against all structural and non-structural proteins of novel coronavirus-2 (nCovi-2019). While informing this, Dr. Seema said that this research has been disseminated to the scientific community for experimental testing using ChemRXiV preprint platform and it needs to be studied in vitro for conclusive evidence.

“The vaccine candidates that we have designed and developed are small coronavirural peptides, molecules which are used by cells to trigger an immune response to destroy cells harbouring these viral peptides. We designed and developed the potential eopitopes using powerful immune informatics approaches with computational software. These epitopes can be used to vaccinate entire population,” says Dr Seema Mishra faculty at University of Hyderabad.

Adding further Dr Seema said that usually discovering any vaccine takes nearly 15 years of time, but by using powerful computational tools it helped in quickly enlisting these vaccine candidates in about a small period of just 10 days.

As part of their research, the UoH researchers had ranked the list of potential candidate vaccines; based on how much effectively they will be used by human cells to stop the virus has been generated.

While explaining further Dr Seema observed that with no matches present in human protein pool, these corona viral epitopes pose no cross reactivity to human cells and hence, the immune response will be against viral proteins and not human proteins.

However Dr Seema said that these results have to be investigated experimentally in order to provide conclusive evidence. These results have been disseminated to the scientific community using ChemRxiv preprint platform for urgent experimental assays.

It is said that if the scientific community conducts further experiments and comes out with conclusive positive results of its effect against corona virus, a vaccine can be developed within just 2 months period and can help in containing the deadly and fast spreading pandemic across the globe.